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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22983823">This House Will Not Let Me Leave</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehaikubandit/pseuds/thehaikubandit'>thehaikubandit</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>haunted houses that aren't entirely haunted or houses, just a Time trapped in the Spiral</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 06:22:17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,374</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22983823</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehaikubandit/pseuds/thehaikubandit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone walks through a yellow door and then everything gets a bit weird.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>This House Will Not Let Me Leave</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>This house will not let me leave.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I don’t know how long it’s been. I don’t know how long it took me to realise this.</p>
<p>It started simply enough. I opened a door and walked inside. Exactly the same as any other time I walked into my house. Or into any house. And it was my house. I still remember how it should look. But this isn’t it. Maybe that should have been a clue. The once familiar wallpaper is patterned with shapes I can’t understand. It hurts my eyes to look at them.</p>
<p>The floor is different too. My house had carpet. It was warm, soft and you could curl your toes into it. Curl them right up, grabbing the fibres beneath your foot until your leg cramped. Now there are floorboards. They interlock in zigzagging patterns that don’t seem to line up with the walls. It’s like the floor is too wide for the width of the rooms.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This house, which is not my house, will not let me leave.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Was it ever my house? The door was. It was my safe, familiar, front door. The wood was painted yellow, slightly chipped at the bottom. The letter box was new, a gleaming brass slot in the middle of the door. The handle was old though. It was cold, black iron like the knocker. I can still remember the feeling of the key in my fingers as it turned in the lock, and the feeling of that handle. That was the door I opened, I’m sure of it. Why is this house so wrong?</p>
<p>But now I cannot find that door. There are other doors. Some that look like they belong inside a house, some that look exterior, like they should lead outside. They don’t. They just lead to more rooms. There is a sliding glass door with peeling stickers at waist height so that you don’t run into it. There is even a fire door with a metal bar you push to open it. Above the fire door is a glowing green exit sign. It’s a cruel joke. There is only another twisting hallway on the other side, with impossible floorboards and those bending shapes that decorate the walls.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This house, which cannot have been my house, will not let me leave.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>There are no windows. I feel myself forgetting what the sunlight looked like. The lights in here hurt my eyes. They are too bright, and I feel my head pounding. I can’t find any light switches to turn them off. What happens when I need to sleep? I can’t sleep with the lights on! Even as a child I needed to lie in darkness. I had no night lights to keep the monsters away. I didn’t need them. I felt safe in the dark. Beneath these lights I feel exposed. I feel the house looking at me.</p>
<p>Is it taunting me? Does it think this is a fun game? These turning rooms and corridors of impossible proportions? I keep walking. I tried running at first. It didn’t help. I didn’t feel tired, and all I found was more wrongness. I just found it faster. Why aren’t I tired? Surely it’s been weeks. Or months. But maybe it’s only been seconds. I don’t remember how time works any more.</p>
<p>I’ve tried to double back and turn around. I tried the first moment my door, or was it my door? It must have been my door. Since the first moment my door closed behind me and left me in this house that is not mine, I turned around and tried to leave. But there was no longer a door behind me. Only a large room, empty and mocking. It must be mocking me.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This house, which laughs at my attempts to escape, will not let me leave.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The fact that there is no furniture is the most worrying thing. Despite everything else, I am most unnerved by the emptiness. My familiar table, the little stools at the kitchen counter, even the oven or the bath. These are all gone. I know that it’s no longer my house, if it ever was, but surely other houses have these things. What kind of beings live in this place with no furniture? We all need to sleep and eat and wash. But the memory of when I last did any of these things feels very long ago. So perhaps not everything does. Perhaps I don’t.</p>
<p>There are no pictures on the walls either, though sometimes there are mirrors hung at just the right height for me to see myself if I cared to look. I don’t. All of the walls are covered in wallpaper. It is a dark pink, striped in waving lines. The lines twist into spiralling shapes that seem to go on forever, getting smaller and smaller but never stopping. I feel like if I had a microscope I’d see the patterns continue, and continue, right down into the subatomic world. The protons and neutrons, all the quarks, trapped inside the spirals.</p>
<p>I run my hands along the wall. It feels like paper, cool to the touch. I stop and try to follow the spiralling pink lines with my finger. Something cool runs down my face and I pull my hand away from the wall. When I touch my nose, I find that it is bleeding. I do not try to follow the lines again. I avoid looking at them. Or at the interlocking zigzags of the wooden floor. I look only straight ahead. I keep walking.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This house, with its impossible fractals, will not let me leave.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I can’t remember many things now. Does that mean that I’ve been here a long time? I had a name once; I must have done. Maybe I had a lover or a child, parents, friends… I can’t remember them if I did. Was I happy outside this house? Perhaps I wasn’t. Perhaps inside this house, for all it frightens me with empty rooms, I am happier than I have ever been. Maybe I am sadder. All I know now for certain is what that door looked like. That yellow door.</p>
<p>I feel a weight upon my back. As I lift my foot to make my next step the weight lessens, and as I place my foot back down it returns. Once again I lift my hand and run it along the wall. This time I feel the touch on my own skin, caressing my side, fingers playing over my ribs. Beneath my fingertips there is still the texture of paper, but it is warmer now. I press my fingers hard into the wall and gasp as they dig into my side in turn.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This house, which is consuming all that I was, will not let me leave.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I can no longer tell where I begin and this house ends. I do not think I like this, though I cannot be sure. I pass a mirror and drive my hand into it, the shattered glass biting into my fist. Inside of me, something also shatters, and I cry out in pain, voice echoing in the vacuous space of this house. The pain in my hand is secondary to that inside. The blood that drips from the cuts towards the floor seems to spiral as it falls. Some of the droplets spiral gently upwards instead. There is nothing behind the glass but more wallpaper.</p>
<p>Later, when I pass a mirror with the same frame, in a room that looks identical, though I have not doubled back, it is unbroken. When I see this, I notice that the pain inside me, deep in my bones and organs, is gone.</p>
<p>I see that my reflection is not what it once was. I cannot make out my features, they warp and undulate in the glass. I do not think that I looked like this before. Was there a before? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I was always a convoluted shape in an empty house. Maybe I am not that, even now. Perhaps none of this is real or all of it. It’s not important which is true.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This house will not let me leave.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I no longer remember why that matters.</p>
<p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This story was written for class but I liked it enough to share, so I hope you liked it too! Comments and kudos make my day &lt;3</p></blockquote></div></div>
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